From MoA:

Earlier today a raid on a military training center for the National Security Directorate, the Afghan CIA offshoot, killed some 200 forces. The attacking rebels used a U.S. made armored Humvee to drive into the compound and exploded it. A infantry unit followed and shot up the survivors.

Citing the CFR:

What we need is an open-ended, affordable strategy for not losing.

From MoA:

The $8 billion spent on the Afghan airforce have resulted in a mostly incapable force that depends on U.S. contractors to keep its birds flying…

If the Taliban manages to win without an airforce why should the Afghan military need one?

From Don Bacon in the comments:

Pakistan fears a growing US-fostered India interest in Afghanistan, and acts accordingly. Pakistan doesn’t want to become an Indian sandwich (my words), with deadly foes on both eastern and western borders. So Pakistan supports the Taliban…

As the US piles on Iran, that country is supporting the Taliban in western Afghanistan, further insuring that the US and its Kabul puppet government will fail…

Twenty years ago the US befriended the Pashtun Taliban government in an effort to gain support for a US petroleum pipeline project in Afghanistan, a central component of the US silk road strategy in Central Asia. But the Taliban refused so the US with India aid enlisted the northern tribes, predominately Tajiks, to overthrow the Pashtun government in Kabul.

From Nafeez Ahmed in 2015:

The post-Cold War period saw the Pentagon’s creation of the Highlands Forum in 1994 under the wing of former defense secretary William Perry — a former CIA director and early advocate of neocon ideas like preventive war…

O’Neill reveals that the Pentagon Highlands Forum was, fundamentally, about exploring not just the goals of government, but the interests of participating industry leaders like Enron…

Through the late 1990s, Enron was working with California-based US energy company Unocal to develop an oil and gas pipeline that would tap Caspian basin reserves, and carry oil and gas across Afghanistan, supplying Pakistan, India and potentially other markets. The endeavor had the official blessing of the Clinton administration, and later the Bush administration, which held several meetings with Taliban representatives to negotiate terms for the pipeline deal throughout 2001. The Taliban, whose conquest of Afghanistan had received covert assistance under Clinton, was to receive formal recognition as the legitimate government of Afghanistan in return for permitting the installation of the pipeline.

Enron paid $400 million for a feasibility study for the pipeline, a large portion of which was siphoned off as bribes to Taliban leaders, and even hired CIA agents to help facilitate.

Then in summer 2001, while Enron officials were liaising with senior Pentagon officials at the Highlands Forum, the White House’s National Security Council was running a cross-departmental ‘working group’ led by Rumsfeld and Cheney to help complete an ongoing Enron project in India, a $3 billion power plant in Dabhol. The plant was slated to receive its energy from the Trans-Afghan pipeline…

Then in June 2001, the same month that Enron’s executive vice president Steve Kean attended the Pentagon Highlands Forum, the company’s hopes for the Dabhol project were dashed when the Trans-Afghan pipeline failed to materialize, and as a consequence, construction on the Dabhol power plant was shut down. The failure of the $3 billion project contributed to Enron’s bankruptcy in December…

By August, desperate to pull off the deal, US officials threatened Taliban representatives with war if they refused to accept American terms: namely, to cease fighting and join in a federal alliance with the opposition Northern Alliance; and to give up demands for local consumption of the gas…

Two days before 9/11, Condoleeza Rice received the draft of a formal National Security Presidential Directive that Bush was expected to sign immediately. The directive contained a comprehensive plan to launch a global war on al-Qaeda, including an “imminent” invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban. The directive was approved by the highest levels of the White House and officials of the National Security Council, including of course Rice and Rumsfeld. The same NSC officials were simultaneously running the Dhabol Working Group to secure the Indian power plant deal for Enron’s Trans-Afghan pipeline project. The next day, one day before 9/11, the Bush administration formally agreed on the plan to attack the Taliban.